So what do we think about Brutal difficulty?

[dumb_master]

I played through the campaign once and I'm not a huge fan so far. I like the new enemy behaviours but the increased pace feels so frantic that it's hard to keep up and actually react to enemies properly.

Call it Skill Issue but I feel like it just encourages more projectile boost / sawblade / coin spam instead of smart tactics because of how evasive some enemies are and how much harder you get punished for taking risks.

[Riteo]

It's well done: a lot harder but without being completely unbalanced.

Personally, it made the campaign fun and fresh again.

After P-ranking the acts on violent (not P rank yet for the primus sanctums, I'm not that good), I simply played the cybergrind most of the time, with some occasional replays of some of my favourite levels, as the campaign got too "slow" for me.

That's the point I suppose, once your brain adapts to the fast gameplay, having a chance to make it "fatigue" again is very fun IMO.

Everybody's different, so no judgment here. I think that's it's nice to have the option of pushing one's limits, if they so desire :D

[<#76428a>Sharkbilby]

The patch removed a lot of bs: a single virture before would be able to constantly send down huge beams that go away after nearly 5x as much time as a normal one, cerberi had no cooldown on their double dash and almost no stop between dashes and healing was practically impossible before.

I can't accurately determine how fair it is since I have 400 hours on the game and that'd it'd be pretty unrealistic for me to expect that of everyone, but I think it just takes some getting used to. You're right about pboosts, saws and coins, but they aren't exactly not meta in other difficulties either.

[Waltnut]

It’s great. Violent is still probably gonna be the best difficulty for a while though.

[dumb_master]

Originally posted by Sharkbilby:

I can't accurately determine how fair it is since I have 400 hours on the game and that'd it'd be pretty unrealistic for me to expect that of everyone, but I think it just takes some getting used to. You're right about pboosts, saws and coins, but they aren't exactly not meta in other difficulties either.

Yeah that's true, I guess it just exposes how OP those options are and the general lack of counters against them. It doesn't help that approaching enemies is generally pretty dangerous until you get used to their new attack speeds so it's safer to just jump away and spam projectiles.

I sort of wish they'd done it as a "campaign remix" with new and harder enemy spawns in the existing levels, since the enemies from Act II onwards are mostly better-designed and encourage smarter weapon use.

[Nvision7]

I Just beat Minos Prime on Brutal and It took me less attempts then Gabriel, I think the difficulty is quite fun and brings a balanced yet harder experience without making it rage inducing. I am only wondering now what Ultra kill must die will look like.

[<#76428a>Sharkbilby]

Originally posted by Nvision7:

I Just beat Minos Prime on Brutal and It took me less attempts then Gabriel, I think the difficulty is quite fun and brings a balanced yet harder experience without making it rage inducing. I am only wondering now what Ultra kill must die will look like.

I heard ultrakill must die will be an entire campaign remake with radiant enemies, like the master levels from doom eternal.
And once it drops I'll start a new save file and see how much I'll suffer when it tells me to not use a new save file

[Hodling №2]

its trash

[<#76428a>Sharkbilby]

Originally posted by жижкa:

its trash

But I'm sure you'd defend the outrageous pos that is radiant enemies
Get over yourself and learn the new attack patterns or leave it there if you just aren't good enough

[Arc]

violence is betterer
for no real reason, i just feel like being a contrarian :)

[Plumber]

In general, the design philosophy of Violence is “thriving” and Brutal is “surviving”. The simplest and most robust approaches that trade flair for function seem to be the earnest expectation.

The enemies become so fast, erratic and accurate that unconventional approaches get choked out. In many fights, you are punished severely unless you’re at least moving at sliding speed and ideally well off the ground. This bars you from moving in predictable and steady ways while enemies can move extremely erratically; any setup that would require you to loiter for even an instant can be in jeopardy if there’s even a single fodder enemy disturbing you. If a single Cerb exists, the floor near them is lava; if a single Virtue exists, you must always have high horizontal speed; groups of Soldiers demand red explosions, nail/saw traps, and coins.

Despite all this, if you leverage all the tools at your disposal and move/parry efficiently, it’s not that rough to clear on Brutal. While I definitely held some initial apprehension, I only started getting frustrated with it when P ranking P-2, which I attribute to two things: one, I had already played it extensively on Violent and had to force myself to slow down instead of trying to go for 6-minute pace through each fight like I would normally expect, and two, it was already designed to be a taxing and strategy-goading stage on Violent, so enemies getting more speed, better tracking, frequent and zoning attacks and also those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mindflayers randomly deciding to teleport in the way of everything you try to do if they feel like it or hitscan laser you or […] anyway, I don’t feel like it retrofits well.

I really like some of the boss/enemy changes but wish they weren’t all saddled with absurdly fast windups and predictive tracking since it makes movement LESS interesting by forcing only the snappiest movement. Many of the changes enemies received could have been one or the other instead of the whole ensemble and still feel pretty reasonable for a higher difficulty without twisting the game too much. I didn’t really like the Ferryman and launch day Sisyphus and now every enemy and their dog leads their shots to punish you for trying to do anything interesting that normally encourages movement setups, like coin punching or anything that the new Firestarter rocket launcher tries to do. Adding new enemy attacks and patterns is something I expected and wanted out of Brutal, and absurd tracking was what I expected out of UKMD - where the former would aim to be more complex and the latter would actively try to kill you - but here Brutal is at that second step already. Oh well.

At least there’s a funny middleground between launch day’s unparriable Guttertanks and present Violent difficulty Guttertanks where you can cause them to trip by baiting a punch over some Firestarter oil. New drone AI, sentry double shot, gutterman enrage, V2 getting better movement, filth and schisms actually trying to hit you, and virtue beams lasting longer (not the near instant beam windup once it picks a spot to hit, that’s annoyingly restrictive) - all these things were welcome; softer changes like that which encourage you to play every angle of the game, not less of it, were what I was interested in. Swordsmachine karate chopping you when his sword’s boomeranging is awesome. Choosing when you break a Gutterman’s shield is a big deal. There’s so much good here too, I’m just painfully mixed on it overall because giving so many enemies tracking or instant windups bugs me. I don’t want to call that lazy but I’m much more interested in the functional changes to enemies and how they make MORE of the arsenal rewarding. If you can’t parry a Gutterman twice without waiting several seconds for him to calm down (and ramp to max accuracy in the meantime), and you can’t loiter too close to do a railcoin because of that nearby Guttertank, but you’ve still got rail ready, you bet I‘ll use Screwdriver or Jumpstart nails - the mechanic additions and style buffs the former received and the latter being what I always wanted out of nails both really shine in the situations Brutal likes to put you into. Tellingly, the gutters didn’t seem to have much baseline accuracy/speed adjustment, if at all.

[calembredaine]

i liked that the two gutter boys enable less parrying.
lesser husks leading a bit, too. even the filths when they leap.
v2 was ridiculously funny to see moving, but it just meant more parrying for me. at least it made him fight a little better down the pyramid.
ferryman was odd. using his ranged attack more often actually gave me breathing room.
rest i found nice but not that interesting to talk about. it's just making the game faster. whether i struggle or not, it's still a basic form of challenge.

Originally posted by Nvision7:

I Just beat Minos Prime on Brutal and It took me less attempts then Gabriel

wasn't my case.

[Arakus]

Originally posted by dumb_master:

Originally posted by Sharkbilby:

I can't accurately determine how fair it is since I have 400 hours on the game and that'd it'd be pretty unrealistic for me to expect that of everyone, but I think it just takes some getting used to. You're right about pboosts, saws and coins, but they aren't exactly not meta in other difficulties either.

Yeah that's true, I guess it just exposes how OP those options are and the general lack of counters against them. It doesn't help that approaching enemies is generally pretty dangerous until you get used to their new attack speeds so it's safer to just jump away and spam projectiles.

I sort of wish they'd done it as a "campaign remix" with new and harder enemy spawns in the existing levels, since the enemies from Act II onwards are mostly better-designed and encourage smarter weapon use.

The "campaign remix" you're asking for is going to exist as "Encore mode", and will be separate from the difficulty levels (so you can play with original or encore enemy layouts on any difficulty)

[dumb_master]

Originally posted by Plumber:

-----

Yeah, after going back and trying to P-rank a few levels and also slowing down as you said I've found it a lot more manageable. It still bothers me how twitchy a few of the enemies are, especially Drones which are really annoyingly difficult to hit despite not doing much to be an actual threat. Soldiers also seem to be able to avoid ground slam launches with their commando roll which is frustrating since "launch > rocket launcher airshot" is one of the best ways to deal with them on Violent. I also think the increased volume of projectiles is kind of unnecessary when the game's style is more about reacting to attacks as they happen rather than weaving through projectiles like a bullet hell. It actually makes Malicious Faces easier to kill just by parrying their projectile spray which is pretty funny.

Originally posted by Arakus:

The "campaign remix" you're asking for is going to exist as "Encore mode", and will be separate from the difficulty levels (so you can play with original or encore enemy layouts on any difficulty)

I honestly forgot that they announced that last year. Hopefully it'll be good, but they did also say it'll feature Radiant enemies which are a similar style of "just make it harder by making everything move faster".

[artzpiip]

Many enemy behavior changes are indeed interesting. For example, soldier's combat roll or guttertank's inability to slip forces you to engage them differently. The fact that you can't instakill mindflayers in this difficulty actually encourages you to use your arsenal more. Swordsmachine becomes something that you can't rely on stunlocking so you need to be more careful. Cerberi also make you pay attention to their attacks. Virtues become interesting area denial enemies. Stalkers can't be ignored by players who naturally take damage.

The Earthmover's brain vertical lasers actually make the player engage with its mechanics. However, since protecting idols are time-based and off at the start of the fight, you can still circumvent its laser attacks. Filths, while more easily baitable, now become a threat.

Some of the enemy changes, however, don't really change much or actually make things easier. For an example, malicious face's increased fire barrage actually makes them easier to kill. I think maybe malicious faces splitting into two minifaces upon death or some other interesting behaviour would have made more of a difference.

I think that now that the full gun arsenal has been released, the weapon freshness meter can be slightly more strict in brutal difficulty. It's probably an unpopular opinion but still.

I think the enemy speed is about as high as it can get without disrupting the balance of the arsenal. I feel like if the enemy movement gets any more erratic, it would reduce the effectiveness of some of the weapons (the ones that require a setup) while favoring too much of the other weapons. I feel like in Ultrakill Must Die difficulty, different sorts of enemy behavior changes (that are akin to more interesting brutal difficulty enemy behavior changes) would be a good idea.

[Arc]

Originally posted by artzpiip:

The fact that you can't instakill mindflayers in this difficulty actually

oh so you cant, didnt even notice. explains why they never died to self-damage even though my go-to way to kill them involves the green jackhammer explosion, so im not only hitting all their balls, but can clearly see i am
one more reason violent is the better mode. i like looking out for certain moves to parry or otherwise punish them, but brutal just outright turns those off, rather than simply weakening to no longer be an instant win. its boring and makes enemies feel more samey, not less